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Rockall letters: Your cut-out-and-keep guide to hurling abuse

We at The Rockall Times often wake up bleary-eyed on a Monday morning to be confronted with the terrifying reality of inboxes packed to the gunwhales with the comments, suggestions, niggles and occassional abuse of you, our beloved readers.

Well, we thought, it's about time we shared some of this material with an incredulous world. After all, why should we suffer in silence, eh?

Now, for those who feel a need to take us to task on any aspect of The Rockall TImes, we have three email addresses, each reflecting escalating levels of irritation/ire/rage:

• Not at all happy — You wouldn't shout at us, but you'd certainly make your views known. Please stand up for yourself and email us at minor-niggles@therockalltimes.co.uk.
• Really angry — Seething a little, you'd ask us a loaded question and then raise your voice immediately. If we were dismissive, you'd probably shout. You'd stop short of physical violence but would tell everyone that you were thinking about it. Please send your rant to hate-mail@therockalltimes.co.uk.
• Fuc*king furious — You haven't even read the stuff above. You just saw "fuc*king furious" and came straight here. You're not even reading this now, you've clicked on the email address already. Get it out! Get it out! Only then will the mist fade. The one for you, you poor soul, is death-threats@therockalltimes.co.uk.

Just to outline the sort of material we're expecting here, this is a particularly unpleasant example which we have just extracted with tongs from festering pit of death-threats@therockalltimes.co.uk:

Please don't count my "click" on your website as an intentional one. I accidently came across it whilst researching rascist uses of the english language. I can only assume that you are yourselves human garbage looking for people who you think you can be better than. Don't bother — you won't find many.

Katy Carr

Fair enough. We have instructed our sysadmins department to personally track down and eliminate your click from our database. Readers should note that the offending click will be fully recycled and any useful components will be shipped to the Third World for use in charitable educational projects.

Since we really don't have the faintest idea what Katy is talking about, here are a couple of pointers to enable really, really angry people to get their point across effectively: when hurling abuse about racism, make sure you refer to the relevant article so that people can judge for themselves; and learn how to spell before getting involved in linguistic research. That'd be accidentally, racist and English, according to our dictionary.

No confusion with our next offering, though — an observation from Dwyfor Evans addressing the thorny problem of Denmark's claim on Rockall:

I'll tell you why the Danes lay claim to Rockall. The Faroe Islands was once under Danish sovereignty and I bet those pesky Danes and their imperialist elders consider Rockall a south-westerly extension of The Faroes. The Faroe Islands declared independence many moons ago. Therefore, by definition, the Danes must consider Rockall (or south-west Faroes as I am sure its known on the streets of Copenhagen) their sovereign territory. It would certainly be a boost to the Danish oil industry, so I understand the motivation.

Indeed. We've addressed this preposterous claim before. For the benefit of any Dane who reckons the Faroes are a possible springboard for a seaborne assault on the Sacred Rock, we'll reiterate the following interesting statistics:

Total number of ballistic missile submarines:

• UK: 4
• Denmark: 0

Total number of operationally-available nuclear warheads:

• UK: 200+
• Denmark: 0

Lovely.

Of course, life on Rockall isn't all international politics and abuse. Sometimes there's love, too. No, really. In response to our recent piece on the shocking UK film Sex Lives of the Potato Men, we were delighted to receive a lovely email from the director Andy Humphries thanking us for our interest in the piece and promising to send a DVD. There will doubtless be more on this most depraved of works as soon as we've had a chance to take a shufti.

And we'll end this particular ego massage with a real classic. Thanks to Nic Wright. We love you too, man:

Brilliant - absolutely brilliant. Found it by accident, bookmarked it when I finally stopped laughing and got up off the floor. Not only superb satire, but a damnedly accomplished web site to boot. But then you know all this already. So I'll stop wasting your time and get back to Yeast Logic....

Quite right. We'll be running lots more letters as and when we feel they have reached a critical mass — possibly weekly, you never know.

People who dislike us are already catered for above. Anyone with anything intelligent to say can bung it to us here. Go to it.

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